Part 33

As evening came, one man still wandered about amid the ruins, a lonely man in lonely travail of spirit. He wore the garb of a priest, and on his features was the stamp of a fate fulfilled. Those who came at a late hour to seek and accompany him, greeted him with reverence, for he was accounted by them a saint of the people and a prophet of the kingdom to come.

He spoke to them: “I have lied to you; I am but a weak creature like the rest.”

They rocked their heads and one answered: “Little Father Ivan Michailovitch, do not destroy our hope or cease leading us in our weakness.”

Thereupon this saint of his people gazed at the body that lay under a horse-blanket amid the trampled flowers and the charred ruins, and said: “Let us proceed then even unto the end.”

XXVIII

Thrice on the street Niels Heinrich stopped and stared into Christian’s face. Then he went on, stumping his feet against the asphalt and hunching his back. At first he dragged himself painfully along; gradually his tread grew steadier.

At Kahle’s shop he asked with toneless jeer whether the gentleman was employed by the police. In that case the gentleman needn’t delay or worry. He knew the way to headquarters himself.

“I did not go with you from such a motive.”

“Well, what for then?” The gentleman was talking crazy again. He had a way of trying to make people drunk with talk.

“Do you live in this house?” Christian asked.

Yes, he lived there. Maybe the gentleman would like to look at the stinking hole? Right ahead then. He himself wouldn’t stay upstairs long. He just wanted to fix himself up a little more neatly and then go to Gottlieb’s Inn. That was a better class café with girlies and champagne. He was going to treat to fifteen or twenty bottles to-day. Why not--since he had the brass? But first he’d have to go to Grünbusch’s to pawn something. Maybe all that’d bore the gentleman; and maybe not, eh?

These words he snarled out in his rage on the dark stairs; but beneath his rage seethed a hell of terror.

The light of a street-lamp close by his window threw a pale, greenish light into the room, and saved Niels Heinrich the trouble of lighting a lamp. He pointed to it and remarked with a snicker that to have one’s lighting at public expense was pure gain. He could read his paper in bed and didn’t even have to blow out the lamp before going to bed. That showed you how a man had to live who wasn’t without brains and might have gotten ahead in the world. It was a lousy, stinking hole. But now things would change; he was going to move to the Hotel Adlon and have a room with a private bath, and buy his linen at the Nürnberger Bazaar.

He put his hand in his pocket, and a clinking could be heard. Christian took his words for incoherent babble and did not answer.

Niels Heinrich tore off his crumpled collar, and threw his coat and waistcoat on the bed. He opened a drawer and then a wardrobe, and with astonishing dexterity put on a clean collar, so tall that it seemed to enclose his neck in a white tube, tied a cravat of yellow silk, and slipped into a striped waistcoat and a morning coat. These things looked new, and contrasted absurdly with the stained, checked trousers which, for some reason, he did not change for others. The cuffs of his shirt were also soiled.

“Well, then why?” Suddenly he asked again, and his eyes flickered rabidly in the greenish light. “Why in hell do you stick to me like a leech?”

“I need you,” answered Christian, who had remained near the door.

“You need me? What for? Don’t understand. Talk plain, man, talk plain!”

“It serves no purpose to talk in that manner,” Christian said. “You misunderstand my being here and my ... how shall I put it?--my interest in you. No, not interest. That’s not the right word. But the word doesn’t matter. You probably think it was my purpose to have you surrender to the authorities and to repeat in court the confession you have made to me. But I assure you that that does not seem important to me or, rather, important only in so far as it is desirable for the sake of Joachim Heinzen, who is innocent and whom his position and inner confusion must make very wretched. He must be in a terrible state. I have felt that constantly, and felt the pain of it especially since your confession. I can almost see him. I have a vision of him trying to climb up the stony prison wall and wounding his hands and knees. He doesn’t understand; he doesn’t understand how a wall can be so steep and stony; he doesn’t understand what has happened to him. The world must seem sick to him at its core. You have evidently succeeded in hypnotizing him so effectively and lastingly, that under this terrible influence he has lost all control of his own actions. There is something in you that makes the exertion of such power quite credible. I am quite sure that your very name has faded from his memory. If some one went to him and whispered that name, Niels Heinrich Engelschall, into his ear, he would probably collapse as under a paralytic stroke. Of course, as I have thought it out, it is an exaggeration. But try to imagine him. One must try to grasp men and things imaginatively. Very few people do it; they cheat themselves. I see him as robbed of his very soul, as so poverty-stricken that the thought is scarcely bearable. You will reply: he is an idiot, irresponsible, with an undeveloped sensorium--more animal than human. Even science uses that argument; but it is a false argument. The premises are false and therefore the conclusion. My opinion is that all human beings have equally deep perceptions. There is no difference in sensitiveness to pain; there is only a difference in the consciousness of that sensitiveness. There is, one may say, no difference in the method of bookkeeping, only in the accounting.”

With lowered head he went a pace nearer to Niels Heinrich, who remained quite still, and continued, while a veiled smile hovered over his lips: “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t desire to exert the slightest influence on your decisions. What you do or fail to do is your own affair. Whether one may desire to free that poor devil from his terrible situation, or not, is a problem of decency and humanity. So far as I am concerned, there is nothing I care about so little as to persuade you to an action which does not arise from your own conviction. I don’t regard myself as a representative of public authority; it is not for me to see to it that the laws are obeyed and people informed in regard to a crime that has troubled them. What would be the use of that? Would it avail to make things better? I neither want to ensnare you nor get the better of you. Your going to court, confessing your crime, expiating in the world’s sight, being punished--what have I to do with all that? Not to bring that about am I here.”

Niels Heinrich felt as though his very brain were turning in his skull with a creaking noise. He grasped the edge of the table for support. In his face was a boundless astonishment. His jaw dropped; he listened open-mouthed.

“Punishment? What does that mean? And is it my office or within my power to drag you to punishment? Shall I use cunning or force to make you suffer punishment? It does not even become me to say to you: You are guilty. I do not know whether you are guilty. I know that guilt exists; but whether you are guilty or in what relation to guilt you stand--that I cannot tell. The knowledge of that is yours alone; you and you alone possess the standard by which to judge what you have done, and not those who will be your judges. Neither do I possess it, and so I do not judge. I ask myself: Who dares to be a judge? I see no one, no one. In order that men may live together, it is perhaps necessary that judgments be passed; but the individual gains nothing by such judgments, either for his soul or for his knowledge.”

It was a bottomless silence into which Niels Heinrich had sunk. He suddenly remembered the moment in which the impulse to murder the machine had come upon him. With utter clearness he saw again the steel parts with their film of oil, the swiftly whirling wheels, the whole accurately functioning structure that had, somehow, seemed hostile and destructive to him. Why that image of all others came to him now, and why he remembered his vengeful impulse with an access of shame now--he did not understand.

Christian was speaking again: “So all that does not concern me at all. You need have no fear. What I want has nothing to do with it. I want--” he stopped, hesitated, and struggled for the word, “I want you. I need you....”

“Need me? Need me?” Niels Heinrich murmured, without understanding. “How? What for?”

“I can’t explain it, I can’t possibly explain it,” said Christian.

Whereupon Niels Heinrich laughed--a toneless, broken laugh. He walked around the whole table; then he repeated that same repressed, half-mad laugh.

“You have removed a being from this earth,” said Christian, softly; “you have destroyed a being so precious, so irreplaceable, that centuries, perhaps many centuries, will pass till one can arise comparable to it or like it. Don’t you know that? Every living creature is like a screw in a most marvellously built machine....”

Niels Heinrich began to tremble so violently that Christian noticed it. “What ails you?” he asked. “Are you ill?”

Niels Heinrich took his felt hat, that hung on a nail, and began to stroke it nervously. “Man alive,” he said, “you make a fellow crazy, crazy.” His tone was hollow.

“Please listen,” Christian continued insistently, “--in a most marvellously built machine. Now there are important screws and less important ones; and this being was one of the most important of all. So important indeed that I am convinced that the machine is hurt forever, because it has ceased to function. No one can ever again provide a part of such delicacy and exquisite exactness, and even though a substitute be found, the machine will never be what it once was. But aside from the machine and my comparison, you have inflicted a loss on me for which there are no words. Pain, grief, sadness--these words do not reach far or deep enough. You have robbed me of something utterly precious, forever irreplaceable, and you must give me something in return. You must give me something in return! Do you hear that? That is why I am standing here; that is why I am following you. You must give me something in return. I don’t know what. But unless you do, I shall be desperate, and become a murderer myself.”

He buried his face in his hands, and burst into hoarse, wild, passionate weeping.

With quivering lips, in a small voice like a naughty child’s, Niels Heinrich stammered: “Saviour above, what can I give you in return?”

Christian wept and did not answer.

XXIX

Thereupon they went from that room together, without having exchanged another word.

The pawnbroker Grünbusch had already closed his shop. Niels Heinrich sought another whom he knew to be reliable. He left Christian in the street while he slipped into a dirty vault. He had torn one pearl from the string, just one, to serve as a sample for the present. After the old rascal who kept the shop had tested and weighed the pearl exactly, he gave Niels Heinrich fifteen hundred marks. The money was partly in bank-notes and partly in gold. He scarcely counted it. He stuffed the coins into one pocket; the notes crackled as he crushed them into another.

“Give him? What does he think I can give him?” He brooded. “Maybe he smells a rat, and suspects that I stole the pearls. Does he mean that? Does he want me to give them to him?”

When he reached the street again, and saw that Christian had waited patiently and without suspicion, he merely made a wry face; and he continued silently by the other’s side. Dumbfounded, he bore the heavy weight of Christian’s continued presence; he could not imagine what would come of it.

But the man’s weeping was still in his ears and in his limbs. A cold, clear stillness filled the air of night, yet everywhere rustled the sound of that weeping. The streets through which they passed were nearly empty, yet in them was that weeping embodied in the whitish mist. In the walls and balconies of the houses to the right and to the left, it lifted up its treacherous voice--this weeping of a man.

He dared not think. Beside him went one who knew his thoughts. A rope was about him, and he could move only so far as that other permitted. Who is he? The question went through and through him. He tried to remember his name, but the name had slipped from his mind. And all that this man, this suddenly nameless man, had said to him, whirled up within him like sparks of fire.

They had reached their goal at the end of half an hour. Gottlieb’s Inn was a drinking place for workingmen and small shopkeepers. It contained quite a number of rooms. First one entered the restaurant proper, which was filled with guests all night. Its chief attraction consisted in a dozen pretty waitresses, as well as twenty to thirty other ladies, who smiled and smoked and lounged in their provocative costumes on the green plush sofas, waiting for victims. Adjoining the restaurant there were a number of cell-like private dining-rooms for couples. Beyond these was a longish, narrow hall, which was rented out for parties or to clubs, or in which gambling took place. The decoration of the rooms corresponded to the quarter and its taste. Everything was gilt; everywhere were pretentious sculptures of stucco. There were tall pillars that were hollow and supported nothing, but blocked one’s path. The walls were covered with paintings that had been the latest thing the day before yesterday. Everything was new, and everything was dirty and touched with decay.

Niels Heinrich went in through the swinging door, looked about dazzled by the light, lurched past the tables, went into the passage that led to the little private rooms, came back, stared into the painted faces of the girls, called the head-waiter, and said he wanted to go into the long hall at the rear, wanted the hall for the whole evening, in fact, no matter what it cost. Twenty quarts of Mumm’s Extra Dry were to be put on ice. He drew forth three one hundred mark bank-notes, and tossed them contemptuously to the head-waiter. That cleared the situation. The functionary in question had a mien at once official and ingratiating. Two minutes later the hall was festively lit.

The women appeared, and young men who were parasites by trade, corrupt boys who looked like consumptive lackeys, clerks out of a berth in loud, checked clothes--doubtful lives with a dark past and a darker future. At Gottlieb’s Inn there was never any lack of such. Cordially they insisted on their long friendship for the giver of the feast. He remembered not one, but turned no one away.

He sat at the centre of the long table. He had pushed his hat far back on his head and crossed his legs and gritted his teeth. His face was as white as the cloth on the table. Impudent songs were sung; they crowed and cried and screeched and giggled and joked and guzzled and wallowed and smacked each other; foul stories were told and boastful experiences; they mounted on chairs and smashed glasses. In half an hour the bacchanal destroyed all sobriety and reserve. It wasn’t often that a man dropped in, as from the clouds, fairly dripping with money.

Niels Heinrich presided icily. From time to time he called out his commands: “Six bottles! A chocolate cake! Nine bottles Veuve Cliquot! A tray of pastry!” The commands were swiftly obeyed, and the company yelled and cheered. A black-haired woman put an arm about his shoulder. Brutally he thrust her back, but she made no complaint. A fat woman, excessively rouged and décolletée, held a goblet to his lips. Rancorously he spat into it, and the applause rattled about him.

He did not drink. On the wall immediately opposite him was a gigantic mirror. In it he saw the table and the roisterers. He also saw the red drapery that covered the wall behind him. He also saw several little tables that stood against the drapery. They were unoccupied, save that Christian sat at one. So through the mirror Niels Heinrich gazed across and shyly observed that alienated guest, whose silent presence had at first been noticed, but had now been long forgotten.

At Niels Heinrich’s left four men played at cards. They attracted a public and sympathizers. From time to time Niels Heinrich threw a couple of gold pieces on the table. He lost every stake; but always at the same moment he threw down more gold.

He looked into the mirror and saw himself--colourless, lean, withered.

He threw down a hundred mark note. “Small stakes, big winnings!” he boasted. A few of the spectators got between him and the mirror. “Out of the way!” he roared. “I want to see that!” Obediently they slunk aside.

He looked into the mirror and beheld Christian, who sat there straight and slender, stirless and tense.

He threw down two more bank notes. “They’ll bring back others,” he murmured.

And when he looked into the mirror again, he saw a vision in it. It was a human trunk, a virginal body, radiant with an earthly and also with another, with an immortal purity. The scarcely curving breasts with their rosy blossoms had a sweet loveliness of form that filled him with dread and with pain. It was only the trunk: there was no head; there were no limbs. Where the neck ended there was a ring of curdled blood; the dark triangle revealed its mystery below.

Niels Heinrich got up. The chair behind him clattered to the floor. All were silent. “Out with you!” he roared. “Out! Out!” With swinging arms he indicated the door.

The company rose frightened. A few lingered; others thronged toward the door. Beside himself, Niels Heinrich grasped the chair, lifted it far above his head, and stormed toward the loiterers. They scattered; the women screamed and the men growled. Only the gamblers had remained seated, as if the whole incident did not concern them. Niels Heinrich swept with his hand across the tablecloth, and the cards flew in all directions. The gamblers jumped up, determined to resist; but at the sight of their adversary they backed away from him, and one by one strolled from the hall. Immediately thereafter the head-waiter, with a look of well-bred astonishment, came in and presented his bill. Niels Heinrich had sat down on the edge of the table with his back toward the mirror. A thin foam clung to his lips.

He paid the reckoning. The amount of his tip assuaged the deprecation and surprise of the head-waiter. He asked whether the gentleman had any further commands. Niels Heinrich answered that he wanted to drink alone now. He ordered a bottle of the best and some caviare. One of the doll-like waitresses hastened in with the bottle and opened it. Niels Heinrich emptied a glassful greedily. At the food he shuddered. He ordered the superfluous lights to be turned out; he didn’t need so much light. All but a few of the incandescent lamps were darkened, and the hall grew dim. The door was to be closed, he commanded further, and no one was to enter unless he rang. Again he threw gold on the table. He was obeyed in everything.

Suddenly it grew still.

Niels Heinrich still sat on the edge of the table.

Christian said: “That took a long time.”

XXX

Niels Heinrich slid from the edge of the table, and began to pace up and down the entire length of the hall. Christian’s eyes followed him uninterruptedly.

He had once read in a book, Niels Heinrich said, the story of a French count, who had killed an innocent peasant girl, and had cut the heart out of her breast and cooked and eaten it. And that had given him the power of becoming invisible. Did Christian believe that there was any truth to that story?

Christian answered that he did not.

He, for his part, didn’t believe it either, Niels Heinrich said. But it was not to be denied that there was a certain magic in the innocence of virgins. Perhaps they had hidden powers which they communicated to one. It seemed to him this way, that in the guilty there was an instinct that drew them to the guiltless. The thought, then, that underlay the story would be, wouldn’t it, that virginity did communicate some hidden powers? Was the gentleman prepared to deny that?

Christian, whose whole attention was given to these questions, answered that he did not deny it.

But the gentleman had asserted that there were none who are guilty? How did these things go together? If there were none who are guilty, then none are guiltless either.

“It is not to be understood in that fashion,” Christian answered, conscious of the difficulty, and conscious in every nerve of the strangeness of the place, the hour, and the circumstances. “Guilt and guiltlessness do not sustain the relation of effect and cause. One is not derived from the other. Guilt cannot become innocence nor innocence guilt. Light is light and darkness is darkness, but neither can be transformed into the other, neither can be created by the other. Light issues from some body--fire or the sun or a constellation. Whence does darkness issue? It exists. It has no source; none other than the absence of light.”

Niels Heinrich seemed to reflect. Still walking up and down, he flung his words into the air. Every one was made a fool of--every one from his childhood on. There had always been palavering about sin and wrong, and everything had been aimed at giving one an evil conscience. If once you had an evil conscience, no confession or penitence, no parson and no absolution did you any good. And at bottom one was but a wretched creature--a doomed creature, and condemned to damnation from the start. That had convinced him, what the gentleman had said--without looking at Christian, he stretched out his arm and index-finger toward him--oh, that had convinced him, that no one had the right to judge another. That was true. He hadn’t ever seen anyone either to whom one could say: you shall pass judgment. Every one bore the mark of shame and of theft and of blood, and was condemned to the same damnation from the beginning. But if there was to be no more judging, that meant the end of bourgeois society and the capitalistic order. For that was founded on courts and on the necessity of finding men to assume its guilt, and judges who were ignorant of mercy.